Superpositions of different shapes of trees, backgrounds slowly fading away from the image, landscapes of microchips, shadows flowing among the grass populatethe photographic canvas of Sebastian Lemm, where a peculiar combination of contemporary aesthetics and lyrical suggestions take place.In a way his work strongly reminds me of some early images made by Harry Callahan (also here) in the mid '50s, one of those authors who really built a bridge from avant-garde experimentation to a more solid autonomy of photography as an art form in itself.

Isabelle Hayeur, Dunes, 2003The 'digital vs analog' debate is often either reduced to mere quality issues like resolution or visual flavour or it can easily lead to metalinguistic concerns about the true nature of images. I am much more interested in what changes in terms of what you can actually show or represent: we all know Andreas Gursky's views of digitally constructed scenes made by assembling different photographs, or the images where he erases elements of the original scene in order to show what he's really interested in.As obvious as it may sound, I think this is the main point of the digital/analog issue: what kind of tool digital is in terms of creating new visions, what digital can achieve not just on the surface of images, but 'inside' them.And by the way, we all know that the best special effects are those who look real (which means 'realistic'), so I guess it would be pretty straightforward to apply the same rule to photography.

Two examples of works aimed at broadening (literally) our vision of things, both with the goal of promoting some critical thoughts about contemporary human spaces:

- Isabelle Hayeur's superhuman visions of natural lanscape and architecture, where the issues at stake are the mutations of the different human spaces, seen through the several forms of conflict underlying these mutations: conflict between natural and urban landscape, economic growth and social disease, old and new urban architecture.

People watching a news bulletin about the invasion of Czechoslovakia inside the hotel lobby.

My father went to Prague with a friend in the summer of 1968. They arrived on an afternoon, spent the night around, bars and streets were full of people eating, drinking and having fun. The next morning they heard a strange noise from their hotel room, only to find out it came from the military tanks that were descending the hill in front of the hotel: the Soviet Union was invading the town. The hotel staff put a warning sign on the door of the lobby, all foreigners who wanted to leave the hotel were doing it at their own risk. There was a weird silence filling the streets, people started to gather around the lines of tanks. My father shot a first roll of film and a Soviet soldier ran towards him, and ordered him to open the camera and throw the film out. He shot a couple more, during that single day he spent in an occupied city, before joining the lines of cars of foreigners led by representatives of the English and American embassies that left Prague the morning after.He always told me that the best pictures were on the roll the soldier ordered him to espose to sunlight: there were people crying, and an old man spitting on a tank moving next to him. But I like the strange feeling of these images he brought back with him: there’s indeed silence and disorientation, I think they truly show ordinary moments of an extraordinary situation, and so I decided to share some with you. Hope you’ll enjoy them.

"All foreign citizens are required to stay inside. Those leaving the hotel will do it at their own risk".

Tammy Mercure's work is another contribution to the great theme of the human interaction with places (especially visiting and travelling to places), with that ironic feeling that show us human beings as slightly lost creatures trying to find their way through things, keeping themselves busy, pretending to be having fun or anything else to hold everything together. It is a feeling we have become familiar with, since contemporary photography has offered us a wide variety of examples of this approach, where the photographic eye keeps asking the same question: "Who are these creatures and what are they doing?"

Here's two more examples:

Natascha Libbert's Men and Orchids and Men at Airshow, two series depicting groups of people so absorbed in the environment they almost seem to lose themselves in it; the first one shows men frantically taking pictures of the orchids, while in the latter the male adults wandering around planes and sexy flight attendants are hypnotized more than kids in a toy shop.

Peter Otto's Tourist Places, an interesting rendition of the sublime act of taking a "touristic photograph", depicted in such a plastic way that it becomes some sort of ceremony.

One last thing about Mercure's work: her series Wonders is made of images of Wisconsin Dell, a tourist mecca in the American Midwest full of replicas of many wonders of the world. The images are made with pinhole, thus taking those places back to a time when they did not even exist, erasing the difference between the real place and the cheesy reproduction of it.I like to consider those images as glimpses of what all those people, all those tourists are trying to grasp, some kind of inner vision made of expectations, memories and desires, while a strange midst surrounds the 'real' place, leaving almost no chance to a real 'vision' of what the eyes have in front of them.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

We all know him for his landscapes captured inside the darkness of empty rooms, his Camerae Obscurae prolonging the magic of the birth of photography, but Abelardo Morell has many more things to show and tell us, as he kindly did in the following interview. Enjoy the read!

HB: Your early pictures were somehow inspired by the street photography of the 50's and the 60's in the US, and then you sort of moved inside your house's walls and started creating your own visual world. What made you change direction and turn your vision towards your own personal life?

Abelardo Morell: When my son Brady was born in 1986, the combination of new feelings for family life and being tired of the more alienating looking ironic work that I was doing in the streets led me to consider life from a more stationary and loving point of view. I discovered the pleasures of view camera work, which was so fitting with the subject of my family and domestic objects in front of me. I believe that this shift of focus in the mid 80’s still influences the pictures that I’m making now.Topsham, Maine, 1982

HB: Some of your series seem to have something in common with certain aspects of the Surrealism movement, both your recent Photograms and the way you’ve been photographing objects in other series, somehow reminding the Objets Trouvés as described by André Breton. But at the same time your images deal with those objects in a totally different way, not leaving anything to chance. What’s your opinion about it?

AM: Surrealism was very important in my early artistic development because it helped me shake certain rigid boundaries. Magritte is one of my favorites – he paints objects in a very matter of fact way, almost photographically. I prefer that sort of surrealism where the world almost looks right and then after some inspection it doesn’t add up. In my work I like playing with the normal to see if it can lead to supernormal areas.

Still life with Pears: Photogram on 20” x 24” Film: Contact Print, 2006

HB: Your images often seem to deal with a re-representation of a pre-existing image, rediscovering the visual meaning of things we are quite used to look at.

AM: Because things have been photographed and represented so much it is often the case that they no longer have the same impact they once had. Imagine making an interesting sunset picture? I guess in my work I want to reilluminate some new sense of what we have gotten used to. It’s partly the Ezra Pound command of art TO MAKE IT NEW.

HB: How did you start the Camera Obscura project? What was your main inspiration?

AM: In the early 80’s, when I began teaching I would turn my classroom into a camera obscura to show students the roots of photography, so in 1991 while on leave I decided to actually make a picture of the effect - something I had never seen done before. My first picture was in our living room in 1991.

Boston's Old Customs House in Hotel Room, 1999

HB: Do you plan to end this series at some point or can it go on forever?

AM: It seems that I ‘m coming up with new variations on the camera obscura project – now I use color and I’m inverting the image so that it’s right side up. I plan to make some outdoor camera obscura images in Texas in March. So it continues.

HB: What makes you choose to keep or dismiss a Camera Obscura after you shot it? Did you leave out many exposures from the final series?

AM: The failures are few because I spend so much time preparing that usually I get what I want. Occasionally the sun doesn’t come out, or somebody opens a door.

Umbrian Landscape in Empty Room, Umbertide, Italy, 2000

HB: In your Money series you turned money from something we use to something we look at, or play with, reminding somehow the toys in your Childhood series. What was your inspiration for this photographic work?

AM: Money is symbolic paper and in that sense this work is a bit like what I did with books. In another sense I guess that I want to make pictures of money as pure material in a way to disconnect it from its less flattering hold on us.

$ 7 Million, 2006

HB: Have you ever thought about illustrating other books after your work on Alice in Wonderland?

AM: I’m thinking of working on the second Alice book, Through the Looking Glass.

HB: What does the use of black & white mean for you?

AM: I began shooting black & white in the streets copying my heroes like Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus etc, so emotionally I’m tied up to strong feelings through black & white. Recently I have been using color and I like the new sense of reality this film can suggest - It makes me feel like a young painter.

HB: Do you still teach photography? What role did teaching play in your career?

AM: I have been teaching photography since 1983 and I still love doing it. My best students help me more than they know. Seeing their enthusiasm and ways that they find to solve visual problems energizes me to no end. The biggest pleasure comes to seeing a little of my own beginnings in them and that in turn makes me keep going.

HB: What interests you most of the contemporary photography scene?

AM: The new contemporary scene is so vast that it’s hard to understand it all. I try to keep up with it - mostly young artists. Looking at talented young people reminds me of my own beginnings and it inspires me to remain young at heart, too.

HB: What’s next in your photographic projects?

AM: I’m working on photographing early American words written by the founding people of the United States. Like Lincoln’s handwritten word SLAVERY.

Intrigued by Mrs Deane's recent launch of their [On Eizo]project about 'the new existence as a screen image' of contemporary photography, caused by the ever-growing experience of photographic images on a computer screen rather than as publications or shows, I would add another perspective on the topic of 'virtual view' of images. The main thing for me is the loss of a true perceptive experience of an image: you loose the details, you lose the tonalities, you loose any relation with the format, you basically end up pretending you are looking at an image, while you're just enjoying some sort of abstract of the final work. This is especially relevant with works that mostly rely on a particular rendition of the light, where the subject in itself is not so important as opposed to the 'visual environment' expressed by the peculiar qualities of the final image.Here's one dramatic example of online virtual viewing of photography: Michael Schnabel's vistas of dark mountains and museum halls are (in theory for me, since I never saw printed images) a true celebration of the power of hiding rather than showing, images whose strength come from what they suggest rather than from what they expose. But what are we actually really looking at? Sophisticated post-production or some gross 'digital' light merely added on the image subsequently? The LCD screen of our computer will never tell us the truth, I'm afraid.(P.S. If you have trouble with Schnabel's site flashy navigation, you might prefer looking at some of his works here)

More cyclism with Brent Humphreys' Le Tour (you'll find it in his website under 'projects'), an interesting exploration of the glorious French race, mainly focused on its faithful supporters wandering around hills and cliffs to support their idols. Some slick-looking images, but a lot of fun and an interesting comparison with Jacques De Backer's work on the same subject (find it right below).

A little bit of sea now, since we're still in the middle of January, even if it feels a bit cold in the photographs as well: Mer agitée à peu agitée is a work by Belgian photographer Jacques De Backer, scenes of daily life in front of wide views of the sea, where all the people to me look like visitors in front of something they never saw before, both puzzled and intrigued by the endless stretch of water in front of them.Take a look also at Off Course, his ongoing project about cycling races.A short interview with De Backer here.

Slow start in this 2009, hence what better way to open the new year than Matthew Porter's flying cars? For anybody who (like me) grew up watching stuff like The Dukes of Hazzard, his images of acrobatic driving taste like something familiar, and yet they are so finely realized and so strangely still they almost look like an abstract rendition of the popular culture they seem to come from.